This week’s session looked at adapting and supplementing published material. On our table we first discussed ‘When?How?Why?What?’ is it that we adapt. We came up with a rather concise list we then had the opportunity to compare with other groups. This is us:

All groups had very similar ideas which was rather reassuring. One which jumped out at me was this one:

Ever since I was given a computer with a projector in class I was determined to make some use of it. Reason being was not because I felt competent or confident using it but it seemed like what needed to be done. My school, just like many in Brighton & Hove are, is not  purpose built but stretches across 4 terraced houses. Classrooms are small and filled to the rim with furniture. Mingles are tricky and involve a furniture shifting exercise at the beginning and end of an activity. The room layout is what plays a big role in my lesson planning. Having a projector seems a perfect distraction and solution to our spatial limitation problems. It allows me to do what one of the groups beautifully called ‘lifting it off the page’. However good the coursebook may be and however good of a materials designer a teacher is, activity types need to change throughout the lesson to keep students engaged. I believe that there is a certain stigma associated with using coursebooks exclusively among both teachers and learners. The minute we put books to the side it seems something active, fun or simply different is about to happen. Lifting off the page could change the pace of the lesson, extend coursebook content or simply use the projector to quickly pre-teach or review vocabulary from the text. My biggest issue with coursebook is that they simply overfill a page with information. Staggering activities can prove difficult as students cannot avoid looking at what’s ahead. Using the projector or simply copying parts of the book and cutting those up into more manageable chunks is one of my favourite ways of adapting and supplementing.

Amidst a wealth of terminology the expert seem to unanimously agree about ways of adapting.

McGrath (2002) stressed the importance of the interdependence between adaptation and evaluation. He also enlisted processes which consist of adaptation:

• Selection
• Rejection
• Adding
• Changing

Madsen & Bowen (1978 in Tomlinson 2012 page 151) emphasise ‘that good teachers are always adapting the materials they are using to the context in which they are using them in order to achieve the optimal congruence between materials, methodology, learners, objectives, the target language and teacher’s personality and teaching style’. Although McDonough (2013) recognises the ad-hoc, ‘think on your feet’ adaptation he further concludes that it ‘is essentially a process of ‘matching’ (…) to maximize the appropriacy of teaching materials in context’. As adaptation can only be followed by reflection or evaluation prior, during or post teaching experience it is important that it is ( just like evaluation) based on a set of principles. Here’s a visual representation of McGrath’s (2013) principles motivating change:

A rather controversial approach to designing materials was one of Prabhu discussed in Maley’s paper ‘Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment’. Prabhu recognised that the reason why teachers are often pushed into adapting is in attempt of bridging the gap between what materials offer and what the learners need. This is a result of publishing industry which designs for the widest audience in mind and therefore prescribe the content, pace, order and procedures they deem suitable. Prabhu suggests devising a menu-like book which uses either semi-materials (collection of activity types and raw input) or meta-materials (collection of pedagogical procedures). Both proposals would give the teacher more freedom in choosing the material, pace and delivery method. Prabhu also recommended flexi-materials which combine the two mentioned above. Though I have never come acrosse a published book quite like it it seems the be where EFL teachers, myself included, are currently going. My context being mostly monolingual one week groups with a brief to cover a range of topics, the menu-like folder is exactly what is needed for such courses. This allows me to select the level of material as well as type of activities to include. All this being in form of worksheets also enables me to stagger different lesson stages.

Here’s and example of a unit I chose to adapt for my students the other day.

First of all my students were not Intermediate and all were very slow readers. This is why I decided to take the text out of the book and hand it out as a separate piece of paper. What’s more the text had also several expressions highlighted  for the purpose of a follow up exercise later on the page which my learner’s would find distracting. To put my student’s at ease I have also lifted off the lead-in activities onto the whiteboard to get students to work together. To extend the reading and the topic of polyglots we then also watched a clip with the star of the article. This has worked really well and I used similar lesson format with this groups for 2 weeks I had them for. I used the PPT presentation handout as a loose lesson plan and added comments for future use. Here it is – lifted off the page:

Polyglot

References

Maley, A. (2011) Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd edn) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.379-402

McGrath, I. (2002) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (Chapter 4 Coursebook-based teaching: adaptation & Chapter 5 Supplementation: designing worksheets.)

McGrath, I. (2013) Teaching Materials and the Roles of EFL/ESL Teachers: Practice and Theory. London: Bloomsbury

McDonough, J., et al. (2013) Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teacher’s Guide. (3nd ed) Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. (Chapter 4 Adapting materials)

Tomlinson, B. (2012) Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (02): pp. 143-179.